


After the Other

by Siria



Series: After the Other [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-30
Updated: 2006-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:30:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Radek comes to visit him in July. It's only a flying visit, a couple of days snatched between a quantum physics conference in Bern and a lecture tour in America, but Radek is determined to make it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Other

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed by Trin.

Radek comes to visit him in July. It's only a flying visit, a couple of days snatched between a quantum physics conference in Bern and a lecture tour in America, but Radek is determined to make it. It's four years since he's seen Rodney, since Rodney handed in his third doctoral thesis and sat impatiently through his last dissertation defence. Four years since Rodney got on a plane home because he needed a couple of weeks to 'think things through' before he accepted one of the dozens of offers of grants and fellowships and research positions which had been piling up almost since before he took his first undergraduate degree. 'Thinking things through' seemed to involve him taking a job at a university (_a good one, but not a great one, not enough research funding_, Radek knows) there, settling down into the house which once belonged to his parents, turning down every offer that's made to him and refusing to return most people's e-mails.

It causes a couple of murmurs among some of the more perceptive members of the scientific community; especially those who had been around at the time of the explosion, metaphorical and literal, which occurred when a fifteen-year-old Rodney had published his first paper. It causes Radek to worry; not that he would ever say so to anyone, and not that he would _ever_ say so to Rodney. They know each other too well for that.

But this is not the Rodney he's used to, this Rodney who is content with seemingly so little. He answers Radek's e-mails once every two months or so, but they are terse and to the point and contain descriptions of the _weather_: the second paragraph invariably begins 'Well, it's raining at the moment'. The Rodney who writes them doesn't seem full of impatience and energy, the young man who wanted to look inside the heart of a star and see what was there, to take apart the universe just to see how it worked. This is not the Rodney who would sit up all night to work through equations because he knows, he _knows_ he's right, and the others are _wrong_, the Rodney who used a combination of an exotic accent and a bludgeoning manner to browbeat every department secretary, TA and research fellow at Northeastern into a charmed submission.

He doesn't say it to Rodney when he arrives that July, but he pays careful attention to what he says, how he says things. He watches him out of the corner of his eye from the time Rodney meets him at the over-crowded airport, watches him when Rodney's cooking dinner for them in his tiny kitchen, watches him as he brings him on the tour of Trinity (quickly truncated), or curses at the Dublin traffic. He watches him when they're sitting in a poky little pub in Temple Bar, with Radek feeling mellow on some good whiskey, Rodney more than half-drunk already. They talk cautiously around different things: the appalling stupidity of Adam Kavanagh's latest paper in _Annalen der Physik_, and the greater stupidity of whoever peer-reviewed it; Elizabeth Weir's latest funding coup; life in Ireland, life in America; truncated and carefully edited versions of four years of their lives.

"I'm not going to go back, you know," Rodney says abruptly, staring into his seventh tumbler of whiskey and water.

Radek says nothing for a moment; he takes another mouthful of Paddy's, lets it burn slow and hot on the way down. "Can't or won't?" he says in the end, voice infinitely careful, infinitely soft. He's known Rodney since the other man was a gangly and wild-haired teenager who'd just stepped off the plane; he's seen him at his best and at his worst, knows when to push, and when to pull away.

Rodney's fingers fiddle for a moment with the beer mat in front of him, tearing it into small shreds, then smaller, before stilling. "It used to be can't," he says eventually. "Now it's won't." When he looks up at Radek, his eyes are a steady blue. Radek looks at him for a few minutes, then nods at what he sees.

He settles back in his seat, raises his glass, makes himself comfortable, and it's like the last four years have never happened, except in all the ways that they have. "_Tedy_," he says after a minute, with a small grin, "You are not going to tell me?"

Rodney takes a deep breath, rounds his shoulders and clasps his hands in a way that Radek can interpret exactly, for all that Rodney doesn't know it. "His name is John," he begins.

Radek listens.

* * *

It begins like this. Rodney's plane, nonstop Boston to Dublin, lands on a Friday morning in early March. It's raining heavily, just like it was when he left; looking out the window at the landscape, blurred and grey and green, as the plane taxis to a halt, it's almost easy to believe that he never did. "Fáilte go Éireann!" the air stewardess chirps at the front of the plane. "Welcome to Ireland! On behalf of Aer Lingus, I would like to wish you all a pleasant stay here in the Dublin region."

Rodney rests his forehead on the cool glass of the window and mutters "Not bloody likely."

He collects his luggage, clambers onto the 16A, goes back to his parents' house and sleeps until late afternoon. When he wakes up, it's all as parochial as he remembered it. Within a day, two, people seem to know he's back. By the end of the week, he's getting job offers. He doesn't even bother replying to the ones from the ITs (who were clearly only chancing their arm. Athlone? _Carlow_? Christ), snorts at the ones from the government task forces (he's still got some standards, after all), toys with the idea of UCD, but eventually decides on Trinity (he needs something to pay the bills and to occupy his time, after all; and there's no greater time-waster than the Trinity bureaucracy).

He spends most of April mindlessly drunk. In May, he adopts a kitten from a local shelter and calls it George, for no reason he is ever able to fathom, especially not since George is a she. In June, he starts work in the college.

* * *

It happens like this. By early August, Rodney is assigned one of the tiny offices that are crammed into the attic space of the Long Library. This is because he's a monumental pain in the arse.

By rights, he should be down in the Hamilton with the good little physicists, in a big, bright concrete office where he has all the space he needs, and his students can pester him as much as they want. His tiny little office - all eighteenth century wood and carvings held together with dust and wood lice, four floors and fifteen twisting, turning flights of stairs from ground level, at the other end of campus from his classes - is supposed to be a punishment for him. The administration's less-than-subtle way of saying _fuck you_ to a faculty member they don't like, but can't afford to fire without losing face (they wanted him in the first place) or grant money (his name is worth something, even now).

It's supposed to be a punishment, but Rodney really doesn't care, hardly even thinks about it. He likes how still it is, how quiet; how the pressure and weight of centuries of books and study and dust have made it so peaceful that he can work easily no matter how many hundreds of tourists are wandering around and gaping with dull-eyed incomprehension two floors below him. He likes how there are no idiotic colleagues around to object to the times when he puts on Shostakovich or Grieg and lies on his back on the bare boards of the floor and _listens_. He does some of his best work up here, locked away in this office, fingers of one hand tapping away on his keyboard, fingers of the other snapping away in time to the rhythm and beauty of the numbers and the formulÃ¦ in his head, with all the roofs and spires of Dublin spread out in front of him.

Rodney knows it's supposed to be a punishment, and he knows that's supposed to rankle with him, that it _should_. But he hardly ever thinks about it.

It goes like this for two years, three; it's almost like a routine, the best kind, the one where Rodney doesn't have to think about the things that shouldn't matter to him.

* * *

Two years, three, and then the Provost changes, administration policy changes, the people around him change. The Manuscript Library gets a new head, a man with a shock of dark hair, and a lowly lilting Galway accent, and an office directly opposite his.

Not much, in the grand scheme of things, but it's a stutter in the rhythm, it's a break in the routine, from the first time Dr John Sheppard introduces himself. From the first time that John leans just that little bit too close to him, smile just that little bit too open, curve of shoulder and line of his arm just that little bit too much, too fine for Rodney to look at without stammering. The first time John brings him up a styrofoam cup of the watery excuse for tea that the Arts Block serves, the first time that John discusses maths with him.

It's a change in his routine, and maybe it's a change from everything that's come before. Rodney tries not to let himself think about it much, not to let himself hope, because he's got used to this life, this whatever it is, and then. Then John slips him a ticket to the recital in the NCH that's been sold out for months, the one that Rodney would sacrifice his hypothetical first-born to see, and smiles a little at him, looking tentative and strangely young, and says "You wouldn't be doing anything on Saturday, would you?"

He lets himself think about it the first time he fucks John across his desk. Skin slipping and skidding on old wood, worn cotton rustling across the pages of some Junior Fresh exam Rodney should be correcting and doesn't give a damn about. It's slow until it's fast, controlled until Rodney breaks, breath hitching in his chest like he's crying, like he's laughing. He closes his eyes when he fucks John deep, opens his eyes when he comes. He fits one palm to the flushed curve of John's cheek, looks at the way John is looking at him, and lets himself hope just that little bit more.

* * *

John lives in a new-build apartment block, in a few small, over-priced rooms on the second floor, so far out on the southside that he's practically in Wicklow. Rodney lives in his parents' old house on the northside, semi-detached and halfway crumbling.

John's apartment makes him strangely restless, and Rodney's not overly fond of his house. They see enough of the city centre during the week, so they compromise and meet at Howth at the weekends, spend their Sundays walking along the pier and looking out to sea. The water is a deep grey, stretching out dark and heavy to the distant horizon. John was raised on the eastern shores of the Atlantic Ocean, Rodney spent years on the western; and for both of them, this sea seems too shallow, its shores too small. They come back here again and again, regardless, watching the water and watching each other. Sometimes they talk, and sometimes they're silent. Sometimes John skims flat pebbles out across the sea, and sometimes they sit and are still.

Sometimes, on the coldest, softest days, when it threatens rain or when the drizzle is already falling, John kisses Rodney, or Rodney kisses John. They curl into each other for brief, endless moments, savouring the rasp of stubble under tongue, the catch and sob of breath, the curve of a smile, the meaning of a gasp.

The rain always gets heavier, but John never minds.

* * *

For someone in charge of an entire section of the library, John never seems to do much work. No-one could ever say that the Manuscript Library is mismanaged; its tiny staff seem perfectly happy working for him, John brings in funding and new acquisitions at a steady rate, and his desk is always kept scrupulously neat, free of the stacks of paperwork which always threaten to engulf Rodney's.

Yet whenever Rodney passes by John's office, on his way to lecture or search out coffee or harass undergrads or whatever excuse Rodney's currently using to look in at him, he's never working. He might look bored, tossing a sliotar from one hand to the other, or distracted, composing truly filthy e-mails to Rodney, or even, as on one memorable occasion, energetically performing a truly spectacular air guitar solo to Thin Lizzy. ("There'll never be another Phil Lynott, Rodney." "Thank heaven for small mercies.")

Mostly, though, he seems to select first editions and crumbling old anthologies almost at random from the length of the Long Room, sits cross-legged behind his desk and reads by the hour. Pope and Grey, Thompson and Dryden, Cowper and Shakespeare and Marlowe, scribbling notes occasionally on one of the refill pads he keeps stacked in his desk.

Once, Rodney asks him why, curiosity and something else pushing him: why a job that he seemingly can only approach at such right angles; why such a career for a man obsessed with sport and bad music and things that go very, very fast; why a life that keeps him indoors, earthbound; why this. John leans over, presses a kiss to Rodney's neck, idly strokes a thumb along his collarbone. He explains, as much as John ever can, about his home and about his past, about the need to get away and the desire not to go too far, about the tenuous but true connection that exists between the best of books and flying.

"That," John whispers into his ear, voice laughing low, "and sure don't you know I look hot in tweed?"

Rodney can't deny that, doesn't even try to.

He doesn't try to deny anything when John asks him why he is at Trinity; there's nothing to deny, because he's still not sure why he's there himself. He tries to explain it, though, talking to the curve of John's shoulder, whispering secrets into skin. Maybe, by the time he's finished talking, he understands it a little better himself; and maybe, by the time he's finished talking, John is holding him that little bit tighter.

* * *

In only a couple of months on campus, John manages to make himself incredibly popular. He's got the weird sort of charm that comes with being handsome and friendly and open-seeming, that comes with the hair and the tweed and the heavy-framed glasses. He doesn't teach any classes or see any students - Rodney doesn't even know how the students know that John _exists_, since half of his physics undergrads don't even seem to know where the science block _is_ \- but the fact remains that requests for admission to the Manuscript Library have more than tripled since John took over. Rodney doesn't pretend to understand it, but he doesn't pretend that he doesn't see it, either; especially not when it means that John charms the bartender in the Buttery into selling them a lot of takeout bottles that they smuggle back across the quad and drink in Rodney's office.

John and Rodney are still there at two in the morning, but the bottles of tequila aren't. John thinks it would be a good idea to go climb one of the trees in front of the Rubrics. Rodney thinks he's insane, and tells him so repeatedly, slurring over the most emphatic of consonants. He doesn't try to stop him, though; just follows him down the stairs, snagging his digital camera on the way so that he can have a permanent record of John sitting on the spreading branches of an oak, cross-legged and smug and smiling, a smear of dirt across one cheekbone.

Later, Rodney will print out the picture, have it blown up in Read's, and use it to embarrass John as much as is humanly possible. Just then, though, he settles for lying on his back on the dew-wet grass, laughing up at John looking down at him. He wonders at how the weight in his chest seems lifted, the weight that he never knew was there; it's gone, and he feels lighter than he ever thought possible, and more grounded than he can ever remember being.

It's a strange feeling, and he might have dwelt on it just that little bit more, freaked out a little; but then a security guard finds them and it's all angry shouting and John drunk and giggling and Rodney finds he doesn't care, because this, this is how he remembers joy.

* * *

It's still July when Radek leaves, the weather humid and unusually warm, the city wilting beneath a clear blue sky. Rodney and John bring him back to the airport, three people and two suitcases crammed into John's car. Radek and Rodney say their goodbyes just before security, while John looks a little embarrassed and very hesitant and makes excuses about needing to use the bathroom.

A little awkward, still; but there's a lot of manly back-slapping, and talking, with Rodney gesturing and Radek smiling. Radek says "I will tell Elizabeth you said hello, yes?" and Rodney, who hasn't spoken to her in five years, twists his lips a little and says "Maybe, maybe you could tell her I'll see her soon? We might, John and I, we might be over in Boston soon. I think I can, now."

Radek grins.

* * *

John's father had a tiny little farm somewhere up in the back of beyond, all stone and a thin scatter of soil. Even if the land had been better, it would have been too small to turn much of a profit; Bill Sheppard had to make his living from small EU subsidies and smaller government grants, but still farmed there til the day he died.

John knows he should have sold it on when his father passed away. He's lived abroad for years, in Dublin for several, and he rarely goes back west; there are plenty of people who want to build holiday homes in the area now, people who would pay him obscene amounts of money for a ramshackle old cottage and a couple of acres of land because they think the harshness of the land, the vastness of the sky, is picturesque and _pretty_.

He doesn't sell up. He tells himself it's because of laziness, that it's because of an opposition to yet more ugly new-build concrete bungalows planted on a landscape that's meant for stone and sky and open air; he tells himself that because he doesn't want to admit that it might be because of sentiment.

He doesn't want to admit it to himself, but he brings Rodney there anyway. The drive back is longer than John remembered it, the traffic even worse. Rodney sleeps through most of it, four and a half hours of bad roads and worse drivers, only waking up once they pass through Galway City, muttering something about leaving the last vestiges of civilisation behind them. John just grins to himself, enjoying the expression on Rodney's face as the roads they take get narrower and rockier, become lanes, become bohreens, as the landscape gets wider and the sheep get more abundant. "Christ," Rodney says, "I woke up and found myself in _Peig_, didn't I?"

Rodney's less than impressed with the cottage itself; John admits it could use some work, but at least there's indoor plumbing now, and electricity, and a tv that picks up all four channels (_There's only_ four?), and no, Rodney, there's no broadband, there's no _phoneline_.

John's rarely seen Rodney speechless, but being mostly cut off from the outside world apparently manages that; it's kind of nice, and he takes advantage of it. He wrestles Rodney into his coat, coaxes him outside, striding off across the fields that John loved as a child and hated as a teenager. The air is clear, wind so cold that it stretches John's smile tight across his face, burns and fills his lungs. The Atlantic is a blue-grey slash in the distance, the ground rocky underneath their feet. When Rodney catches his foot and stumbles, he grabs John's hand to steady himself; when he stands up straight again, John doesn't let go.


End file.
